Cryogenics
by Jade Eclipse
Summary: The most benevolent creatures in the universe try to fix what's broken in the Doctor. Unfortunately, that's quite a lot.


_Hurts._

_It hurts, it hurts._

What hurts? He doesn't hurt; he is too numb and cold to hurt. The ground beneath him is like a sheet of ice, sapping his body of the excessive heat he has carried in him throughout his long, long life. He knows fire; he is an old friend of fire. It burns bright and hot with restless, untamable energy, and ultimately dashes itself out with its own dancing. Fire has chased through his veins for ages and ages, whirling and blazing and burning. Before this, before now, it seemed that everything always ended in fire, just like

_Hurts hurts hurts, oh, it hurts! Make it better, make it quiet, make it calm. Soothe, soothe, make it well. Oh, it hurts; it hurts so much; make it go away; make it stop._

He knows nothing of ice, not really. There was that one place, that one time… He tries to frame it, to remember it properly, but it slips away and he lets it go with the mental equivalent of a shrug and a sigh. He wants to sleep here, so tempted to slip away. He is clinging to his freezing corner of the universe while he spins dizzyingly through the vacuum of space. His fingers are trying to find purchase on the glass-smooth earth, and his stomach is tied up in knots from the vertigo coursing through him. He is curled up partially on his side, twisted at the shoulders so that his chest is flush up against the ground. His eyes are squeezed closed and his breath grates as it is sucked through his clenched teeth.

He doesn't know how he got here, or where he is. He is hurtling through space, and for some reason all he can think about is Blue. There's something important about that color: blue, molded into a straight-lined representation of something loyal and constant. A lovely, reliable color, home to the wonderful and the horrible: laughter and adoration and panic and hope and sorrow and dread and

_Pain! No, no, no, no. Take it away, take it all away. It must stop – lie still. Lie still, and it won't hurt. So much screaming, so much hurting. Let it go; it will be quiet, just let it go._

Oh, he aches. It is nothing more than muscle memory, a reminder of unbearable, insurmountable agony. That's all right: the memory doesn't concern him. He is draining himself into the cold and it feels like the tide going out, slow and smooth and susurrous. He is on the edge, here, and there is the seductive, inviting promise of a fall if he doesn't move and interrupt this dreamy drifting of his. He remembers he always liked the feel of falling, which is strange – he doesn't remember much of anything right now, though that doesn't bother him.

Except – oh, he ought to have a name, shouldn't he? Legends always have names, in one obscure way or another. (And here, he decides he ought to be a legend, as well. Legends are good. He likes legends.) So he starts digging though what's left in his head, and he tracks it down through the muddled, tangled, confused mess that is his brain. (Has it always been this untidy? And it really is emptying at an alarming rate. Strange, he had always thought of himself as a uniquely cerebral individual.) When he finds it, this misplaced name of his, he grabs onto it as tight as he can. It's a slippery thing, though, and it wriggles and squirms like a fish in his hold and flitters out of reach. Its tail briefly brushes his fingers as it goes, but the sensation fades too quickly for him to capture more than a brief glimpse of letters and syllables.

This whole situation strikes him as incredibly, horrifically wrong, but the brief spark of panic he experiences is swiftly stifled by the quiet lullabies pressing themselves up against his eardrums, wrapping melodically around his body, easing the creases on his brow and matching the beat of his hearts. He relaxes, and allows himself to roll onto his back. He exhales once, and when he breathes back in the air is chased with sweetness, a honeyed peace teasing its way into his mouth to linger on his tongue and tickle its way down his throat, down to his chest where it spreads its soporific spell to encompass his rib cage and work its way down to his toes and up to the crown of his head. It is almost uncomfortable to let his muscles unwind, bleeding out invisible tension he is so used to maintaining.

_It still hurts. There is so much. It must be made whole. It must be fixed._

His skin tingles. It is the only way he knows he is still connected to the lump of meat and cloth that is spread out beneath the glorious cosmos. He laughs, and he feels his trachea bob. The sound echoes, and he imagines he can see it swirling away like stardust into the black, just like the Scarlet System as it was swept into the black hole – he almost bites his tongue as the cold spikes abruptly. (For all he knows, he actually _does_ bite his tongue; he can't feel it to know the difference.) He is splendour insensate, and as he slides further into oblivion he can hear the faint tremor of mournful weeping and pitiful screaming from the mist around him, a desolate undercurrent to the calming lullaby. The mist is wailing.

_It is so broken. It hurts, it hurts. Little broken dreamer with so, so many cuts._

_Doctor?_

He starts slightly, arm flopping in an ungainly spasm. He surfaces for a moment at the sound of the foreign word. It is muted and strangled, but something about it drives a shard of light across his mind. It is discordant among the whispering voices.

_Doctor?_

He makes a faint noise of protest – little more than a whimper, really. He doesn't want the light; he wants the inky darkness to coil around him and let him rest. He is so tired, so very, very tired, and so very, very old.

_Doctor?_

"Doctor?"

It is like waking up. With a jolt he struggles to open his eyes a slit, and there is motion from nearby that makes his whole being nauseous to look at. Something warm touches his arm, and it sears his skin. If he could, he would pull away, but instead he frowns and blinks up at the incomprehensible blur above him. It takes a lot of effort to stay focused, but he manages it enough to see the blur descend until it is directly beside him. Red, he thinks, and he tries to say it, but his lips are uncooperative and what comes out is a garbled sound that could not even qualify as a word.

There is something that might be a sob or a short laugh from the Red thing, and the burning touch moves up to his shoulder. He lets his eyes be drawn back to the fog-filled sky, but the Red thing shakes him. (It is gentle, really, but it feels powerful enough to snap the vertebrae in his back and make his teeth rattle in his mouth. It does neither.) "Doctor, come on. Look at me."

The command is delivered in such a strident timbre that he does so. If he squints, the Red thing starts to resolve into a recognizable shape – pale skin, a pair of grayish eyes, a narrow nose, and lots of ginger hair. Human; a human woman. (Oh, Earth. He really loves the Earth. Shakespeare was brilliant.) He thinks that she really ought to have a name, too, and he tries one out for size. "Donna."

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah, Doctor, it's me." Her voice is shaky, which seems to him so un-Donna-like that he frowns. Donna's not supposed to be shaky, and especially not to him.

"Something's wrong," he slurs out, because it's the only reason for Donna to be like this. It reminds him of that trip they took before (fire, again, and rock? He can't recall exactly,) and it has him worried.

She huffs, and he feels considerably relieved. "You're being a dunce, that's what's wrong. Going off like that… Nine hundred years old, you act like a great big kid." She tightens her hold on his arm and hauls him up to his feet with only the warning of, "Come on." Everything spins as he rises; he gasps and almost falls. She catches him, winding an arm behind his back to hold him up.

_No, no, no, no, no! It can't go; it hurts! Fix it; it hurts!_

He groans and sags against Donna, who squeaks her objection and adjusts her grip on him. "Heavier than you look," she mutters, and half-drags him along the planet's surface. Now that he is somewhat more aware, he realizes that it isn't a smooth, slick plane at all. It is uneven and craggy; the wind stirs up the top layer so that mist and dirt can mingle on the breeze. Before, the words in his head didn't make any sense; they babbled on about phantom pains while he floated serenely in a cotton-coated haze, but now he begins to understand. There is nothing sharp, still, but he is sore to the marrow of his bones, sore in every muscle and nerve, deep and gnawing, but growing, like embers fed oxygen, and he knows he's going to be in for trouble if he doesn't get back to the… to the… _to his ship_, because Donna, he knows, would be just the sort to give him aspirin when she finds out he's not feeling well, and regeneration is just _not_ something he wants to go through right now. (Because, damn it, he _likes_ this body, and is not ready to part with it just yet. The hair is fun and he has very practical taste in footwear this time around.)

He sorts through that thought, which might just have been a run-on, and decides he rather likes the sound of "not feeling well." Excellent euphemism, that; he'll have to use it more often. He is wobbly on his feet – this time, when he stumbles, Donna doesn't quite react in time, and he crashes to his knees and stays there, swaying slightly. He can feel little rocks through the fabric of his trousers, and that is good. That is very good, because it means the cold hasn't atrophied all of his senses just yet, and if he gets out now he'll be able to defrost without permanent encephalic damage. (En-ce-pha-lic. Pretty word. Couldn't remember what it meant, but it was nice to say.) Donna takes his arm and hauls him to his feet. He winces at her fingers digging into his flesh, waits for the world to stop swooping around him, and says, "Encephalic." It's even better out loud.

She raises an eyebrow.

"Hippocampus," he tries to explain. "Very important. Need one." He levels a finger at her face, pulling half out of her arms to do so. "Remember that, Donna. Hippopota—no, -_campus_. Very important. Helps make you you. I like you being you. You should always be you. I should, too… but, me instead of you."

She gives a rapid nod that makes him dizzy to watch, and assures breathlessly, "Right, Doctor, of course. Yeah, whatever you say. Come on."

His feet are moving. Walking used to be so instinctual, didn't it? He wonders if he might be drunk. "Where are we going?" he asks.

"The TARDIS."

"Oh," he agrees with a bright, sloppy smile, but then he frowns. "Where's that, then?"

He's pretty sure Donna growls. Still, she keeps her tone bright and comforting. "Just a little ways off, Doctor. We'll get you all better, just you see. Right as rain."

"Am I not right? Is rain righter than me? That doesn't seem the proper way of things. I'm always right."

_No! Stay, rest, lie down and stay here, stay here and rest. It __**hurts**__!_

He flinches, dragging Donna to a halt, and a faint cry rips from his lips. He is shivering; he is shivering enough to shake apart. "It's cold," he whispers. "What are they, Donna? They're in pain. We – we have to help them."

He tries to pull away, she latches on even harder and he hisses at the sensation it elicits. Pins and needles shoot up his arm, clear through to his shoulder like little knives. "We can't, Doctor," she says. "You told me. Once we're gone, they'll be fine. Remember what they are? Remember? You told me. Basic empaths, right?"

He does. The words roll out of him with little prompting. "Gaseous life forms; most compassionate creatures in the universe. Benevolence is part of their genetics. They _need_ to absorb the suffering of others in their presences, or else they go mad. They feel everything we feel, but even more so, unless they make it better. It's why they isolate themselves; they have to, or they would never stop trying to heal everything, and using themselves up in the process. They live just to fix whatever's broken." A thought occurs to him, and he looks at Donna in consternation. "Am I broken, then, Donna?"

She snorts and pulls his arm more tightly around her shoulders. "Must be, going off like you did, _knowing_ what they are."

"They went into my head…" He lifts his free hand to the aforementioned body part.

"Everything that hurts," Donna reminds him. "Guess that includes memories." He does notice her sidelong glance, but ignores it, as he's busy trying to secure what memories he still has, and is about to play tug-of-war over the ones being snatched away. He looks up to find a tall blue box just ahead.

"Ah!" he exclaims, delighted. "There she is. My pretty blue… rectangle-y thing." He takes a step away from his companion. "Get the door, would you, Martha?"

She steps right into his field of view, points at herself, and enforces, "Donna."

"Right. Donna. Sorry."

_Oh, it hurts! Come back; sleep; let us soothe; it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts!_

The things in the mist whip about him and groan while Donna fumbles with the key and gets the blue box – the TARDIS – open. He is grateful that the empaths are too distracted with his broken pieces to zero in on hers, because Donna has many memories worth forgetting, as well, most of which he put there to begin with. He bites back a yawn and fights not to slip into the welcoming mental hypothermia the creatures keep tugging him towards. The TARDIS door opens, spilling out light and warmth. Donna beckons him forward and he staggers inside.

The moment the door is closed behind him, awareness begins rushing back. He makes his way to the console and leans heavily against it. Donna puts a hand on his back and asks him a question – probably the eternal, unanswerable "Are you all right?" – but he isn't listening.

He remembers Gallifrey. He remembers the Master, and Rose, and the maybe-devil, and the living sun. He remembers 1913 and the chameleon arch, remembers Pompeii, remembers the plasmavore, and Lazarus, and the Daleks, remembers Ross and the Sontarans, remembers Jenny, remembers thousands or millions or billions of things before any of that. He remembers nine hundred plus years worth of sorrows. And he remembers all the amazing things that got lost in the attempt to rip out the horrible.

He returns to himself, and he burns; he burns all over.

It feels magnificent.


End file.
